


Fragmentation

by tofsla



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 11:34:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1345966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/tofsla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day after his funeral, Severus Snape took the train to France.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fragmentation

**Author's Note:**

> For Crystal. Prompt: _Snape, wandering_. This is a ficlet written as an exercise,  & may grow up to be a real story one day. For now it's short and really just a sketch.

The day after his funeral, Severus Snape took the train to France. 

Anyone who knew him would have said he looked rather too pale, standing there waiting to pass through the gates at Waterloo station with an unseasonably thick scarf around his neck, sandwiched in line between a family of five looking forward to their first holiday on the continent and two elderly ladies whose argument had been taking place for a solid half hour in a rather baffling combination of French and what might have been Polish. But there was no-one who knew him here to see him, and he found himself quite glad to keep it that way. There is a certain pleasant freedom to being dead, particularly when one finds oneself in the unusual position of being able to walk around and enjoy it. The matter of whether or not one might be considered guilty of murder becomes far less pressing, to begin with. One is able to travel to France without a moment's notice, and no-one will complain that one has failed to appear at one's place of work. No idiotic questions, either at the breakfast table or via the morning post. No secret meetings.

The officer at the border took no more than a cursory look at his passport, as though he was no-one of any particular note. And, in point of fact, he no longer was. 

 

 

In Paris, strong black coffee in Saint-Germain-de-Prés, ordered in stumbled half-sentences of broken French—the language that refused to come, although he could read the newspaper quite well. One night, two, but the city didn't feel right. It required a performance of some sort; theatricality that he didn't have in him just then. And although with magic these things are largely irrelevant, one doesn't necessarily feel far enough from home if one has only taken a three hour train journey. 

The train to Germany from Gare d l'Est was packed with people, Muggles, reading their news and drinking from small paper cups and talking or staring out the window. Fragments of tinny music filtered from what he had at first thought were ear-muffs, which hadn't made any sense, considering the weather.

 

 

In Hamburg he bought a new wand, and in Berlin he sold potions, for a while, to bolster his funds—black market but quite nearly fairly priced, and certainly safer for the consumer than they had any right to expect. To make real money one ought not use good ingredients, but he couldn't bear to do it; something like professional pride, even in the absence of a real profession. He had never been anything but a teacher, after all, and that was a calling only in the sense that he could not have refused. It was too warm in Berlin—or perhaps it was him. His sense of temperature had been off since May.

 

 

In Gdańsk he kept to himself, rented a room in the magical quarter and went out rarely; his German or French might just about pass, but his Polish was non-existent, and he found himself as reluctant to speak English as he had been since he boarded the train in London, as though that would be to invite some sort of disaster. But he enjoyed the city more than he had expected to in any case—enjoyed not talking to people, except the few people in the magical quarter who clung to German. They were without exception elderly, and at least one of them seemed entirely convinced that the city was still called Danzig. 

When he left it was already August, and he went by boat, north-west across the Baltic. There was probably not anything in particular wrong with Stockholm, but he'd grown tired of cities—he stayed only a night, then booked a crossing on another ferry, although he hadn't particularly enjoyed the trip from Gdańsk to Stockholm. People drank too much, and he was sober.

 

 

Åland lay huddled in the Baltic, visible from the ferry like banks of cloud on the horizon. There was no real reason for him to be there, but there'd been no real reason for him to be anywhere for months now. Certainly it had a large magical population, and one might reasonably expect to get by there as a wizard without having to deal with anyone one knew. Several of its islands were unplottable, a little witch on the ferry had insisted on telling him—something to do with some unpleasantness in Sweden a thousand years ago, possibly—but he hadn't quite followed the story, preoccupied with the shifting dark grey of the sea.

Here one could perhaps feel pleasantly isolated. There is something about islands, when they are small enough to cross in by foot in a day; better still, when one can see the sea in every direction, with space only for a house or two, a few low and wind-twisted trees. They give a clearer sense of boundaries; one feels instinctively, although it is patently untrue in a magical world, that one will be able to see anyone who approaches before they come close.

It was on one such island that he rented a house, sheltered from the worst of the weather by the higher bulk of Vinterön, where the main magical community was clustered. A house with two rooms, a little dingy pulled up on the shore, flocks of screaming birds wheeling up into the air ahead of him as he walked from shore to shore. 

He opened up the house to weather it, and checked the woodpile, but left the dingy exactly where it was. It was probably good form to have the damn thing, but he had no intention of drowning himself trying to cross a two hundred meter stretch of water for a pint of milk and some bread. Romance quite aside, Apparition was a fine invention.

 

 

Magic on Åland, though, is not the same. It comes from the sea, and from the borders of the sea; it dislikes Latin incantations, though it will suffer them if pressed. Snape managed; stubbornness could get one anywhere. But it was certainly tiring. Experimentation showed that transfiguration was a little easier than charms, and that potions were hardly more resistant at all. He began to fetch things for himself instead of summoning them across the room, and was grateful that sleep draughts were unchallenging. 

He inspected suspected curses and brewed minor potions for people in exchange for things he needed, and didn't move on when autumn came, although his house was only really built for summer, and although he was sometimes still rather too cold, even when the sun should be warm.

 

 

In October a boat braved the crossing from Vinterön. People did occasionally come to him this way, if they had a very urgent problem and couldn't wait until they managed to find him in the village, so he was irritated but not alarmed. He put the kettle on the stove in the proper Muggle fashion to save on energy, threw the mess of papers spread across his small desk onto his bed and slammed the door to the bedroom shut; it was as well to not seem entirely unwelcoming, if he wanted to stay on good enough terms with people to survive here. The boat belonged to Björn Fredriksson, who was a well-liked fisherman, and word would certainly get around.

But he was rather incautious in this assessment. Perhaps being dead will do that to a person. 

When the boat was tied to the jetty and the occupant had jumped out he could see quite clearly that it wasn't Fredriksson who had come to visit him at all. It was Harry Potter.

If Harry Potter could turn up at his door then Snape was presumably not, after all, dead. And if he wasn't dead then he was quite probably of interest to the Magical authorities of Great Britain in relation to the deaths of others. Certainly someone was likely to expect something of him, one way or another.

"Potter," Snape shouted from the doorway, feeling the wind tear the words from his mouth, try to sweep them away to sea. "Do excuse me. If I'd known you were coming I'd have blown a hole in the bloody boat."

Potter came running up the rocky shore, pink-cheeked from the cold. He didn't look particularly vengeful. He didn't even have his wand out. "Oh, good," he said. "It _is_ you."


End file.
